José Saramago has a short story about the moment “it happens,” as the ancient American proverb goes. You might not realize that that’s what it’s about, though, because of how elliptically (and loquaciously) it orbits the moment when Portugal’s half-century-dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, was sitting on a chair that broke, after which he fell and hit his head, and then, after lapsing into and back out of a coma, over the course of about 23 months of a very peculiar interregnum in which he wasn’t quite dead—but also wasn’t allowed to know that he wasn’t the dictator anymore, and they literally printed a special newspaper to trick him into thinking he still was—it finally happened. He fucking died.
You have to already know all this to get what Saramago is doing, because otherwise it might just seem like a very rambling and what-is-the-point-of-this not-even-a-story about a chair breaking. There are so many long paragraphs about kinds of woods, and the beetles that eat them, and etymology, and so on and on (and on and on). But of course that stretching out of time is the point, about what happens in an instant, a crack, a fall—that before you know it, before you realize it happened, you’re in the consequences of an already past tense event—and then to really drag out that instant for more than twenty pages, stretching and articulating that thing into a meaning and story that goes on and on, so you can know it, realize it.
It goes all over the place. There’s an extended metaphor relating the furniture beetle that chewed up the chair to the generations of laborers that built the pyramids; the African origin of the wood used to build the chair is—just as much a reference to the pyramids—another thing you have to already know to know what it is, but to those who do, it’s a sidelong reminder that what would end Salazar’s government was its wars in Africa, when its colonial possessions—all those people that it “thingified,” as Aimé Césaire would have it—declined to continue to adorn the Portuguese state seat. The collection you’re likely to read it in is called The Lives of Things, a very Verso press title that has a very Marxist interest in how things are always the function of unseen laborers, and how an Event is the visible manifestation of long-running processes that preceded it and, in a very real sense, were it; it’s all about taking vast structural processes that have been fetishized into things and doing the reverse of that to them, giving them narrative life.
(Saramago absolutely slaps.)
Anyway, when I described this particular story to my partner, she made fun of me, a little, for how excited I was about a story about a chair breaking, and she was, of course, correct: it’s a story whose high-flown rhetorical virtuosity is as silly as it is serious, and in that way is, just as much, about how the thing, when it comes, is funny and stupid and kind of gross, too, and not really in anyone’s control. It’s about the failure of letting a chair, of all things, be the thing that gets him. It’s a little bit embarrassed, I think, this communist story written by a revolutionary, that a chair was the thing that got him.
Salazar was not a fascist, by the way, neither officially nor strictly speaking. It’s a bit like the way Donald Trump is technically more of a sparkling authoritarian despot: Centuries of Portugal’s alliance with Great Britain had allowed that little country to remain not a part of Spain, among other things, but it also meant that when the fascist 1930s rolled around, and especially when the war broke out, Salazar had reasons to keep Portugal neutral-ish, being as economically linked to the Allies as he was spiritually linked to the Axis. Having taken power in the early ’30s, then, it would take a chair to kill him, in 1968—though he wouldn’t die until 1970—and in that sense, it is basically correct to say that he was the longest-lasting fascist dictator, as the defining presence for the Estado Novo that lasted nearly fifty years, from the military coup of 1926 until the Carnation Revolution of 1974 that really smashed it (after African guerrillas had rendered its imperial state impossible).
Like most of Saramago’s work from the 1980s, “The Chair” is about trying to figure out exactly what the fuck all that even was, from the abrupt position of looking back at what suddenly turns out to have been over. Having been red-purged from his newspaper job just a few years earlier, Saramago was just then figuring out what his new writing life was going to be, at the ripe age of fifty; this story is part of a truly great novelist’s actually quite belated second act, after a long half-century of not being a novelist. It’s not one of his more famous works. It’s just a short story, just a stylistic experiment about an instant in time, and not even the moment of Salazar’s death (not even about exactly about Salazar); it is about how long it takes for a thing to happen, and how, when it does, it contains all that passed time in that instant.
When people use the phrase “when it happens” or “when it finally happens”—and they do, a lot, on the various social networks where people articulate private desires, publicly—they of course mean the very specific moment when Donald Trump’s physical existence comes to an end, a thing which will actually happen, at some point, and will be accompanied by a variety of emotions (though of course I couldn’t comment). In that sense, the phrase becomes an occasion to express the range of emotions they, and others, will feel about this event when it happens, which it will. Knowing that it will happen (which it will) provides something for those who feel like the last decade of his existence seems to be lasting forgoddamnedever.
Again: I’d never comment. It’s shocking, to me, personally, and abhorrent—and saddening—when people act like the death of the leader of an evil regime is a thing to be happy about. All Lives Matter! The idea that political change should be, or even could be, produced through the death of the figurehead—and that anyone would want that—is hard to even wrap my head around. We live in a world of norms and rules. Imagine if we didn’t and assassination were normalized (I can’t).
Anyway, Saramago wrote “The Chair” after the guy whose secret police would jail you for seditious speech (or worse) had died, and so part of what it’s about, too, are the forms of speech that you close your mouth around, to hide them, a way of talking about anything but the thing you’re really talking about. It’s not wise, after all, to talk openly and explicitly about the intense emotion you anticipate feeling about an event like the Leader’s death, or the way you’re already feeling it, in anticipation. You won’t necessarily be arrested and tortured, or lose your job, or anything similarly grave, were you to openly proclaim a heterodox set of emotions at the prospect of Donald Trump, say, falling and hitting his head and dying (or, for example, being sucked into his golden toilet when a gruesome and unexpected plumbing accident results in a strange and as-of-yet unexplained vortex of hydrostatic force that mangles as much of his withering body as will fit inside the drain, but also leaves the rest of him, perhaps, to linger painfully on for some time afterward, horrible and undignified, children running from his visage in terror, he only half-digested by the shit-abyss that is his excrement-coated destiny, may his memory be a blessing to those who loved him). But the more you can’t really be sure that things like being arrested or fired or sent to a foreign gulag won’t happen to you—the more you hear about things happening to people who really didn’t do anything—the more you get in the habit of coding your language, of conditioning how you make yourself understood when you express feelings about Donald J. Trump. Even when you still want people to understand what you’re really saying—which is that some deaths can never come stupidly, grotesquely, or soon enough—you’re still saying it under the surface.
It’s a defeat, in a way, that we’ve come to this. But we really have. After a decade of waiting for some remnant of what we once took to be the plural-first-person of this country to finally do something about him, it’s hard to imagine anything but the gravitational force of the immanent mortality that awaits us all can put a stop to all of this (or maybe, in a piece of tragic narrative irony that I personally dread, a really strong-flushing toilet?). Nothing else has worked, has it? But maybe, just maybe, the thing that will happen—because it always does, eventually—will happen sooner than later. Maybe that’s enough. And maybe there’s something to be said (even if I’d never say it) about the little ways we say these things, anyway, knowing that we really shouldn’t, and making explicitly that we shouldn’t, all of us chewing away at the dignity that sustains him, with our mouths, like a bug in a chair.